December 2, 2002

it's been snowing for a good few hours, with quite a bit of it blowing around now. almost time to go to the airport; hopefully i'll get to boston without having to spend the night in dc.

the other night i played pictionary with my friends (we used to all the time). it was harder than it used to be, since i'm not used to using pen & paper for writing things.

well i'm now starting the trip back home... to cleveland, from the airport. the plane flying me to dc hasn't left dc yet, so i was going to miss my connecting flight and decided to just try again tomorrow. hopefully taking the ``rapid'' (cleveland's inconvinient version of the T) will be faster than the 1.5 hour (at least) car trip to the airport. note that that's a lot longer than it takes to take the T from my apartment, even though i never step foot on the red line.

also the rapid operator closed the doors on me when i was trying to get on.

...and to make the night complete, they weren't running trains east from downtown...

December 3, 2002

when i was little, i used to dream about the year 2002, where i would wake up in the morning and my email client would show me my mail - not just the one new message in my spam folder, but, say, the 14k mails i have saved in my inbox. i am still dreaming about those days.

i'm at the airport and it looks like i might make it back tonight. evidently my plane got to dc at 10:30 or so, which was approaching when i was supposed to be in boston.

of course, it's snowing a good deal. visibility is ~3/4 of a mile, which is less than the runway but i figure it's straight so they should be ok.

every time i go though security, they like to examine my laptop specially. i'm not sure whether it's the titanium in the case, the internal wavelan card, or the pulsating led, but there's something they like about it.

also in cleveland they like to x-ray the luggage near the ticket counter. the guy in front of me had a bunch of plastic plumbing pipe stuff. their bag was thoroughly searched.

at least they don't ask the questions about if you packed your bags yourself etc. anymore. i always found those annoying.

i feel like i'm getting a cold or something.

i've had a few kernel panics in the last week - including one just now. i wonder if it has anything to do with turning journaling on. also i wonder if that word has one or two l's.

haha it gets better. the plane going to dc finally came in, but there's something wrong with the tail. it's already supposed to have left, so there's no way i'm making the connection to boston...

oh and there's an old woman walking around with "the murder book." i'm sure she's getting searched at every checkpoint.

so the one flight was cancelled or something, so i've been put on a direct flight with continental (incidently, it's scheduled to leave almost 24 hours after i was supposed to leave yesterday). i was supposed to pick up my checked luggage at the baggage claim, then re-check in with continental. i had to go find someone to get my bag; i am not sure what games they were playing with it.

i should probably be at least a little upset, but considering i'm travelling alone and don't have a job or family to get to in boston, i really don't care when i get there. although, if my iPod battery runs out it might be a different story. i haven't found any electrical sockets over by the seats here.

it's going to be sweet when they spend 2 hours de-icing the plane (what's the stuff they spray on the plane?) and then we get re-routed to like pittsburgh or something. at least there's a cinnabon in this concourse.

let us not forget, there is hope

if i cared, i'd say the terrorists have already won. i got searched at the gate *again*. don't they know that terrorists don't sit in row 22 on a flight from cleveland? not that i'm bitter. with the extra 1.5 hours delay due to winds in boston, or anything. this will give me even more time to regret not having gotten a cinnabon. i'd get off the plane and get one, but i'd rather not have to play the ``ok sir, please step over there'' game.

the ``snack'' on this flight better be stellar.

ok it's 11 pm, and i'm home. yay.

December 4, 2002

i figured out what the Mail.app problem was. somehow, a folder called INBOX.spam was created as a subfolder of my inbox, and Mail.app thought that it was INBOX. mozmail, however, correctly gave me my inbox, a subfolder of it called spam, and then a subfolder called INBOX with a folder in it called spam. deleting the rogue spam subfolder on the imap server made Mail.app go worky worky.

however, mozmail has a couple of cool features - like show new mails and their threads - which make me consider using it rather than mail.app.

today was the last day for me being on payroll at the company. over thanksgiving my friends (and their parents, many of who've known me since i was a couple of years old) would ask me what i was doing with my time, to which i could honestly reply, "mostly playing video games and hanging out." i'm still not sure what the look on their faces meant... did they not believe me, or do they think i'm crazy?

shaver: for the record, we got the cookies whilst shopping for dinner; i didn't bring them for him. however, there will be oreos waiting for you when you arrive for the leafs/bruins game on january 11th.

for some reason i'm really tired. i really hate it when i'm too tired to even go to sleep.

December 5, 2002

wow, murray's OT goal was pretty. i got tickets for us to go see ottawa next week. i'm excited.

December 6, 2002

as i woke up from a dream where i was trying to take 2 lost cats home, i realized my arm was asleep. i sat up, and felt something on my leg. it was my arm; i couldn't move it. i picked it up with my other arm, and the hand just flopped down at the wrist. it seemed perfectly reasonable that i'd lose my arm, or whatever. fortunately, the blood flowed back in and i can use my arm again.

i really should set my video camera to start taping 10 minutes before i wake up.

that's all for now.

December 7, 2002

lots of strange dreams. during the last one, there was music going on and it was smashing pumpkins singing a radiohead song. i don't know which one, so i am going to have to listen to every radiohead song i have. well, it might have been "thru the eyes of ruby."

i finally went to see punch drunk love with joe and jenny. there was a surprisingly large audience, considering it had been out so long and was at 11 pm. but it was saturday so i wasn't surprised.

i hope i can fall asleep.

the other day i was thinking about ads on tv vs. the internet, and how some tv ads are somewhat entertaining. at least moreso than maybe all of the internet ads i've seen. i especially hate the ones that try to look like windows dialogs and try to trick you into clicking. i mean, i sleep easily at night cause i run a homeless shelter, but how do those ad people sleep? joe likes this one and i like the one with the colors (i can't find it).

That said, it must be pointed out that many of today's young filmgoers -- alas -- may not have any knowledge of works such as "Brave New World," "1984," "Brazil," or "Fahrenheit 451." To these movie-goers, "Equilibrium" might well look like something, you know, profound.

sigh. evidently i'm not a young filmgoer since i've read 3 of those.

ok going to bed.

December 8, 2002

hmm browns win at the last seconds. would have been nice to see it. at least i remembered to see if the bruins were playing in the afternoon. nice to see the steelers losing when giving up 47 yards of offense to the other team.

my sentences are really not working out for me lately.

i got a fortune in my cookie today which read:

There will be plenty of time
to work hard; enjoy yourself!

hmm, sounds like more vice city is in store for me. or at least some css tinkering. i'm tired.

so joe and i were watching the mod squad and were hungry and i didn't feel like "cooking" and hadn't had sicilia's in quite a while so i ordered one. when the pizza arrived and i asked for the amount of change and stuff the guy seemed upset. i said to joe, "the pizza dude seemed really upset when i asked for change." we started eating and a couple minutes later my phone started ringing but with a number i didn't recognize, so i didn't answer it. they left voice mail, so i listened to it. at the time the movie was going on so i didn't hear it well, but just now i listened again and they just said it was the pizza place and left the number. it's like 4 now so i'm not going to call back. i probably won't call back tomorrow; my policy is "if it's important they'll call back again." it usually works quite well.

anyway, my question is how much should i have tipped? there was already a delivery fee, and i left 10%. another dollar would have been 18%. i dunno it's only a dollar.

but... here's the twist.

if i had known he was going to be so upset, i'd have given him the extra dollar. however, seeing how like unfriendly he was i wouldn't have.

however i'm really tired and this is probably the supidest thing i've ever written about. at any rate i won't be getting anything from sicilia's any time soon.

December 9, 2002

i started browsing without a location bar

my current theory is that the pizza guy slipped on the icy front stairs. however, they weren't icy today. i didn't go outside yesterday so i don't know how valid this theory is. it definitely does make sense though.

i bought some hangers today. i did some laundry today. i finally sent back my old harddrive to ibm today. i had indian with joe and phil today.

i think i'm tired which is good so i can fall asleep since i've been waking up too late. only atching 2 hours of light a day isn't so great.

oh the other day when i got bruins tickets i saw that floor seats for celtics games are $550. yikes.

December 10, 2002

dream before waking up: playing guitar to a led zeppelin (!!) cover of talk show host sitting on the curb of beacon near the coolidge corner post office waiting for the boston marathon to come buy. my guitar had a cool reverb effect, and i could bend the neck really easily like in the weird al beverly hillbillies video. a little bit before that i was sitting on a little hill and my parents and some of their friends were there. i was eating lobster. before that i was supposed to vacuum our neighbor's house. i used to mow their lawn.

so joe and i are watching newsradio, and joe says "dude check out newsradioart.com" so i go there and start reading the part about bitchcakes and get to the part that it says that it was in the episode physical graffitti and i think, hmm that's the episode i'm watching and then i look up and they say the bitchcakes line.

is that a plate of shrimp? i don't think it is, actually.

i put up some old entries from advogato up. they are pretty boring and not funny but whatever. it's mostly about school and gnome hacking (since that's what i did back then).

December 11, 2002

i want to go see comedian again.

i remember having a strange dream about how i'd go to the office during the day cause like i was working on gnome or something. i don't really remember.

i'd forgotten that after election commercials came holiday ones. i'm really looking forward to the 3 days in march where commercials aren't incredulously annoying.

so billy corgan is in town tonight with zwan and i didn't get to go. at least i get to see the bruins play ottawa tomorrow and jon stewart on saturday.

since when does "ax" mean "axe"?

December 12, 2002

hmm, more dreams about my old next door neighbors. i had this one about 3 or 4 sleep filled hours ago, so details are fuzzy. i had something in my hand, kind of like the metal end of a light bulb. i could shoot some sort of laser or something with it. i could turn it, to control the "focus" of it. anyway i was shooting these big things with it that were coming after me. i don't know what they were. but i kept turning it up, so that the laser was more powerul. i turned it all the way up and i guess started shooting it toward the center of the earth, and i started spinning faster and faster.

as if i were in GTA, i could choose whether i wanted to revert to a "saved" life before the laser incident, or continue with the possibly-damaged-space-time life with the post-laser scenario. i chose the latter. i think the next thing i remember was being in france 9 years later. i can't really explain that one.

other dreams included running away from some montsters from LotR or something.

i got woken up at some point by the super yelling to find if anyone was home (i had called yesterday cause the ceiling was leaking again). long ago i learned that if i want to be asleep, and someone's looking for me or something, if i just continue to act as though i'm sleeping (which is pretty easy), usually the problem sorts itself out.

also at some point in my dreams phil was trying to get tickets to somewhere in canadia and had access to the airlines' flight query database thingie where he could type in these weird queries and it would show him the remaining flights.

hahaha ok another dream i just remembered (i always have a hard time typing that word) was i was at some school and it was like lunchtime and there was a tv on and it was showing the tv version of mscl (as if mscl was like buffy - first movie then tv show) and it was pretty bad - it had been on for a while and was due for a cancelling. i mean, jordan catalano was going bald. i couldn't really handle watching it.

so we went to the game and the bruins didn't play very well but it was fun, despite the artic blast being pumped out of the vent near us. it really completed the everest effect we had with sitting so high up.

it's nice to now be able to do stuff i didn't used to have time for. like sorting my pile of coins that i've collected in the past 3 years. i had some interesting thoughts while doing this.

the first was, that it's pretty easy for people to sort coins. and it's probably tricky for robots to do it; both with coin recognition and manipulation. however, it's really easy for people to make machines to sort - just use different sized holes etc. however, is it hard for robots to design coin sorting machines?

the second is more interesting. so, say i checked the dates for all the coins i have, and i find some coins dated from the future. i can be reasonably certain that we figure out time travel, and that people accidentally brought back some future coins.

however, the moment i mention it here then i lose all assurance that time travel is possible and probably the coin would disappear or whatever happens when the future changes.

the moral of this story is, if you ever find a robot from the future that designs coin sorting machines, DON'T TELL ANYONE!

every once in a while i consider going back to school. just the thought of having to use capital letters keeps me from thinking about it further. the only classes i'd be left with would be poetry classes and i really don't think i'd be able to handle it.

i haven't used my icq account in a good couple of years, but i still remember my icq number. i'm not quite sure what to make of that.

December 13, 2002

[ music | Red Hot Chili Peppers -- This Velvet Glove ]

hmm lots of dreams including one where someone from tv - seems like a combination of jennifer aniston and the one from providence had a child like a month overdue and actually had twins and they were both sterile and she thought that was funny, or something.

i had to babysit them for some reason, and they were tired so i was putting them to bed but there wasn't a crib or anything, just like a bed there without those guard rails to keep you from falling out. anyway i put them there and was going to ask where they should sleep when one of them comes in and is all scared and apparently the other had fallen off and hit his head and was bleeding. i think i woke up soon after frantically running around with the bleeding baby in my arms.

later, in a different dream, there was an ad for a new nirvana album - it was ~30 minutes of new stuff. there was also a new aerosmith and some other band that i can't remember. i was trying to watch the bruins game but it was showing me... hmm maybe hartford vs. new jersey? who still has green jerseys?

i'm going to try to go run.

according to iTunes, the last cd i bought was 10 years in the life, way back on sept 10. that seems like a pretty long run with no new cds.

"I took the Beatles' 'Day Tripper' and put it on top of beats from [Kraftwerk's] Trans-Europe Express and then on top of a Dylan Rhymes track, all in real time, though." -- bt

yikes.

speaking of trans-europe express, we used to play that during band dances at half time in marching band, for example in the middle of rump shaker. in the stands during the games we used to play five on it which i now have an aphrodite remix of. something is coming full circle, but i'm not sure exactly what.

one complaint i have about boston is that it rains at night, sometimes. if it was raining while i was sleeping it would be ok, but the raining when i want to go out for a walk isn't so much fun.

there's something about walking while listening to music which is much more fun than either walking or listening to music alone. maybe this is why people dance? hmm not sure.

i'm listening to my headphones plugged into my receiver which has the mac plugged into it. i turned the bass up quite a bit on the receiver, and it sounds so good. i really wish the iPod could put out the bass that this can, or even the discmans with bass boost yum.

yesterday when i was sorting my coins i found a penny from the bahamas. pennies are maybe the most interesting coin we have, because of the color variety.

there are a few songs on adore that i really really like. it's so different from the stuff i like on their earlier albums, but it's good just the same. however, it makes other songs like today sound so thin, ditzy, light. also same thing for strokes songs, even though i love them.

this morning i had "for your love" in my head and i don't have any yardbirds albums, in any form of the yardbirds. except of course for the new yardbirds.

[ music | The Crystal Method -- Keep Hope Alive ]

having something that can really drive some bass into my headphones makes this song really good. keep in mind that i didn't hear this track until like 2000 so it's not completely played out to me, even though it's the theme song to like third watch or something.

i think i'm going to have a headache tomorrow.

December 15, 2002

last night joe and phik and i went to see jon stewart. nat was supposed to go but was still in CA. we put his seat to good use, by storing our coats there.

it was good; he got off to a rough start as lots of people were yelling stuff out. i'm not saying i'm a comedic expert just because i've seen comedian, but i could understand him getting annoyed with them disturbing his act. and it was pretty good, even though he used a couple things from the daily show this week. which is ok, like, it's not like he was making everything up on the spot - but i digress.

today i ate food prepared by phik and played halo with the guys. it was generally fun, but like my teammate said the teams were a bit uneaven.

all that eating and playing halo have rendered me exhausted, so it's time to sleep.

December 16, 2002

i'm reinstating my "no-sleep" policy: the dreams are just too much.

started off with dreaming about driving to manitoba to go fishing at some forgotten puddle somewhere. i was in the car with my mom and my dad was with his friend in the car ahead. we stopped at a wal*mart first and there were these basketball courts that people could use. i got hit with a ball and broke or twisted my ankle. it was difficult to get up.

i left that room and next to it was the music store section, where they mostly had autographed posters and drum sticks. eventually i got out and was at the fishing place... the owner kept talking about the cabins and how they were recently refinished, or were being refinished. i realized i had forgotten the bug spray and was getting worried about mosquitos flying through the walls of the cabin. my dad came in with like a tupperware container with some dried fruit and other food, and some new lures... in the same container. this made me really mad.

there are a lot of details missing because i don't remember them, but i woke up during this part i think and then tried to stay awake but was really tired and it was raining out so i went back to sleep. this was a mistake.

things turned into one of the i've-got-a-flight-to-catch dreams that i've had a couple of. here is a short summary of the problems:

1. i was at the fishing place, not the airport
2. i was in canada, so they spoke french and used french money, which i had none of since i hadn't bought anything on the trip.
3. after finding a shuttle going to the airport, i discovered that my flight left from the other airport at that city.
4. after getting in another shuttle (and i am using this word loosely here. it was a convertible, with like 9 people sitting in it. very cramped) i discovered this was not the shuttle going to the airport. they agreed to let me out, unfortunately my shoes had come off or something and i couldn't find my luggage.
5. apparently i fell and then respawned (my dream had gone from first person to first person shooter) in a deserted part of town but i think i woke up soon.

there were actually some other parts - some my friends from cleveland were working at the hotel gift shop (there also was a hotel) and someone on my parents' street in cleveland had an ad for mcsweeneys in their driveway.

time to watch the "new" newsradio episodes.

i spent most of the afternoon putting together some php which will let me put googlisms on here. thousands of php modules and fewer than 60 lines of cut-n-pasted code later and it works. well it does on my macs but not on this linux box. who knew php could suck?

i was supposed to spend that time going to the store, so now i have neither ice cream nor orange juice.

December 17, 2002

seriously this has got to stop. i'm not laughing.

this morning i woke up deathly terrified from one of the most frightning dreams i've ever had.

i don't remember what crime i had committed, but i was in jail. there was a couple other people in the "cell" with me - it was more like an apartment. i don't remember the details, but we were supposed to rob the cell - there was money in this safe in there or something. there was someone we were doing this for, and one of the people in the cell wasn't involved.

anyway right before the explosives were going to go off, i bailed and ran out of the building, accross the street to like the police headquarters. i ran in there and told them my story.

it got all stake-out-like; there were a bunch of people with guns, and one with this fan/light thing to keep the dust kicked up by the helicopter out of the room. i had to duck under the window so that my partner didn't know i was there.

this went on for a while - they couldn't get a shot on him - it would take 6 or 10 seconds for their bullets to get there (i guess they were using halo brand rockets). i guess he got away because soon i was at my parents' house in cleveland.

i was trying to get the dogs to calm down and get all the doors locked. then the pappa john's guy came to deliver a pizza, and behind his car in the driveway was the car of my "partner" - he was trying to get me to come out. i ran in the basement and called 911 but nobody was answering the phone - it was just ads like on moviefone for wmms.

after a while, i noticed some shadows moving by the window - the guy was coming to the back door. so i was running around trying to find somewhere i could hide.

about now is when i woke up, terrified, and shivering. although the latter could be due to the temperature. unlike last night, i am not going back to sleep only to have even worse dreams.

between you and me, i'm ready for some normal, old-fasioned terrorist, car crash or even tooth dreams.

when i don't have a job and watch comedy central all day my friends get awesome christmas presents.

so i thought it would be stylin' if i used my newfound knowledge of googlism generation to generate my mail sigs. besides the fact that mozmail doesn't seem to let me get my .sig from an executable, i ran into a few snags:

plan 1: just do a standalone php script.
problem: os x doesn't seem to come with a php binary. no, i don't want to build it. no, i don't want a fink version either.

plan 2: just use soup!
problem: i don't really want to link with any libraries. i'm too old and tired to play that game today.

plan 3: i had seen some stuff in the carbon docs for doing soap/xml-rpc calls.
problem: yikes! this api (if one can call it that) is nasty looking. it makes me miss hacking in php, which is a miraculous feat. fortunately, the docs come with a sample app (which worked, unlike the php ones i found yesterday) and should be easy to convert to googlism. granted, i won't have nice functions like strip_tags(), but i can deal.

well, maybe after a nice night of nightmare free sleep!

December 18, 2002

some spelunking with the C-based googlism code; got it calling the method and returning stuff, but i can't get the data out of the return. investigated python but things wanted some extra xml bits, so no dice. might poke at it again tomorrow.

jenny brought indian food over for joe and i, and we watched 3 episodes of mscl on dvd. [ last february i ordered the set for my sister and i. her birthday was last april. i just got them like last week. ]

i was reading an episode guide for seinfeld on the internet, and learned that the new jersey devils used to be the colorado rockies, even within my lifetime. this was nowhere near as shocking as finding out about the usfl.

at just over the halfway point for the month, i've already typed more characters into this month's page than any other month since i started it.

in a completely unrelated note, i can't tell if i was left off of shaver's list because i wasn't fired, because i'm not looking for a job, or because i'm not smart. this joke would be funnier if his statement said "out of" rather than "looking for" but i don't have much to work with this evening.

December 19, 2002

i was going to add link prefetching to the first page, so it would get the current month's page automagically.

experimentation showed that chimera wasn't using it. mozilla would prefetch the page, but also downloaded the page a second time when you clicked on the link. i still might put prev and next tags in but i'm pretty hungry right now.

the weather said it was like 40, so i went running. it was ok.

blizzard gets a gold star for not only being the birthday boy (happy birthday) but for showing me how to get mozmail to check for new mail in folders other than INBOX. Mail.app (which doesn't seem to support subscribed folders) also has this problem. evolution is smart, and has a "check for new messages in all subscribed folders" option. unfortunately evo requires me to run some extra 100M processes, and i can't cut/paste between it and anything else i use.

mozmail has two disadvantages to Mail.app, in addition to being kinda ugly. the first is that it thinks it should open http links in itself. i want them to open in chimera, which is why i set that pref in the system prefs. the other is that it doesn't use the os x address book, and doesn't show people's online status. hmm is that 3?

this is funny on so many levels.

we had a yummy dinner at the elephant walk for blizzard's birthday. i hadn't eaten so much food since yesterday, or even the day before.

this movie came up at dinner, which was coincidental since i got that, along with 1776 on dvd for joe for christmas. fortunately i was the first to give him the latter, so when his parents and kara also get it for him, i won't have to think of something else to get.

i got nat a present fraught with such awesomeness that a mere one layer of wrapping paper can barely contain.

tomorrow it's going to be 50 (!!) when i go running. fortunately it'll be raining so it won't be comfortable at all.

December 20, 2002

i don't think i slept well, but i may have. i know i woke up at 6 (although i may not have fallen asleep yet - not sure) because it was too hot, and then at 9 something because my ceiling was dripping. and then 1 because i was done sleeping i guess.

last night joe and i watched the simpsons where he goes to capitol city with mindy. it is a great episode - joe and i were pretty much in hysterics for its entirety. it will be put on a dvd shortly.

i don't think i'm going running, because the porter square t stop stairs are catching up with me.

this is a good one

rotfl

December 21, 2002

i'm watching the last minute of the bruins game, they're up 3-2 (they just gave up a goal). joe is walking through the door, and simon is here.

they just gave up a goal with 1.1 seconds left. sigh.

i tried playing basketball with nat, taylor and alex. i think i like running, because it has all of the pain of physical exertion, but with less chance of injury (i jammed my thumb and am a bit sore on my leg where i took an elbow or somet), also basketball is much more frustrating (evidently i've gotten even worse than i was in high school).

oh well they tied.

so, apparently phil hartman was a writer (and captain karl) on pee-wee's playhouse (although i can't find any pictures).

this backs my new theory that there are only two or three thousand people on the planet.

simon looks like he misses phil. i'm not too worried though. he was like this last time, until we started feeding him bacon.

life imitating art imitating life

December 22, 2002

i have about an hour before the browns game starts to get windows (with a decent WMP) up and running on my old vaio (n505ve w/ 333 MHz celeron for those of you keeping score at home). this is because, as previously mentioned, wmp for osx doesn't play the browns games (although it handles the bruins games just fine).

so far, i've gotten it to find a hard drive, and the system restore tool looks like it's installing things w/o repartitioning my hard drive, which is nice since i left a few gig there for linux.

i feel too optimistic for this to work.

last night i realized the optimum way for ripping/encoding TiVo stuff. well, besides getting the mpegs off it w/ ftp.

the situation is as follows:

1. the show is on the TiVo, which is in the living room.
2. the dvd burner is in my desktop, which is in my bedroom.
3. my laptop, while having s-video out, doesn't have s-video in.
4. however my (newer) dv camera can go between TiVo and my laptop, so i can import the stuff into iMovie there.
5. i then reboot my laptop into firewire drive mode, and connect it to my desktop (this is the key addition to the process).
6. i then export the movie to one of the local drives on the desktop, using the desktop's faster cpu etc.

no more waiting for 9G file transfers! (granted, both boxes have gigE which makes these go by reasonably quick)

no more corrupted 9G files!

no more hanging finder processes!

*** System Recovery CD-ROM for PCG-N505 series *** Restore the first image. (one of two) Restoring files... This takes from 10 to 20 minutes. (If you want to exit this process, press the ESC key.) 66 percent completed._ (C) 1999 Sony Corporation All rights reserved.

...an hour and a half later...

just in time for the second half, i've got windows98+wmp+wavelan playing the game on my stereo.

the browns won!

December 24, 2002

shaver: is it? ticketmaster claims only the $150 seats are left.

ugh:

• Cleveland clinches a playoff spot:
1. CLE win + DEN win + NYJ win
2. CLE win + KC loss or tie + NYJ win
3. CLE win + DEN win + MIA win or tie
4. CLE win + KC loss or tie + MIA win or tie
5. CLE tie + NYJ loss or tie + NE loss or tie + DEN loss or tie + SD loss or tie + KC loss
6. NE loss + NYJ loss + BAL loss or tie + DEN loss + SD loss + KC loss

*There are other scenarios in which Cleveland can reach playoffs based on strength of victory tiebreaker.

i'm thinking everwhere where the jets can lose looks decently likely, at least if the browns win. although, if the browns had won that first game...

December 27, 2002

simon enjoys being cute

December 28, 2002

the india trip seinfeld is going to be shown on monday.

last night while watching the bruins lose again, i started thinking to myself, "grahame isn't paying attention," but before i could finish this thought, tampa had already scored.

December 29, 2002

J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS! JETS!

wow, so the browns are in the playoffs! fortunately the jets game wasn't as nervewracking as a browns game, although we didn't relax until they were up by 25. if the jets had lost, at least the browns had knocked the broncos out of the playoffs, and we'd be able to cheer for the pats who are a fun team. although if they had lost to miami i would have been spared some anxiety time.

incindentally, last night's bruins win was their first 1-0 road victory since january of 1998.

here are a few games simon likes to play with me:

the attack-my-blanket-when-i-move-while-trying-to-fall-asleep game has been quite popular since i started leaving my door open for him. it isn't helpful for me falling asleep, because every once in a while i get a high speed paw to the face.

the above seems to correspond with the sleep-all-day-but-at-2:30-am-go-crazy game.

the watch-me-eat game consists of simon acting like he wants me to pet him (he walks over to my chair, looks at me sadly, and makes some noise), and then when i go to pet him he runs in the other room under the table. when i go over there, he runs over to his food and starts eating.

the sit-on-my-mouse-cable-while-i'm-trying-to-do-something game happens when i use project builder. i think simon would be a switcher, as he seems to enjoy the animations and stuff.

cry-and-scratch-at-my-door-until-i-wake-up has been replaced with some game i don't feel like naming, where he keeps letting me doze off but not totally fall back asleep in the morning. i think it's less annoying, but i can't really tell.

all in all, i get the feeling that having a cat is not totally unlike having a teenager. he'll be doing something he's not supposed to (although with each passing day, there are fewer and fewer places he's not allowed), and i'll tell him not to do it, but he will just stare at me blankly, as if he doesn't understand the words coming out of my mouth, and continue doing whatever he wants.

i am looking forward to tomorrow. i should be getting my hard drive back from ibm, and the betrayal is going to be on.

December 30, 2002

simon is a sideler. i keep not hearing anything, looking down, and seeing him, even though he just ran out of my room a minute ago.

another game he's learned is the knock-my-hedgehog-off-my-monitor game. this one really makes me mad.

December 31, 2002

our upstairs neighbors, in addition to having incredibly huge feet, also have horrible musical taste. they are having a NYE party, it seems. it started at 5 pm, so i assume it's because they are too lame to stay up until midnight, so they'll be celebrating the new year at about 7 pm and then go to sleep.

i wish i had gotten this for joe's christmas present.

i want a girlfriend who wears scarlet pants.